That depends largely on the skill level of the operator and what network equipment is between them and the big bad Interwebs. I agree with your point in general though.
I don't find 8 to perform better than 7. On a technical level, 8 uses a lot of trickery to "boot" faster, but once it's up and running with all of the usual software installed (browser, office suite, etc.) there is no performance difference between my Win8-from-factory laptop on 8 and on 7. When you do a true cold boot (reboot or hold shift when hitting "shut down") 8 actually seems to start more slowly than 7 on the same hardware. XP makes them both look like dogs, but alas, it's aging out...
I would like to point out that 15K RPM HDDs are a waste of money for the vast majority of home and SOHO workloads. 7200 RPM drives of significantly higher capacities greatly outperform 10K and 15K HDDs. Higher rotational speed only improves the rotational latency. The greatly increased data density of lower RPM drives easily offsets this. High RPM drives are almost always short-stroked which means your heads never find their way to outer tracks by design. A 7200 RPM drive with the same platter density as the 15K RPM drive will have higher sequential read times on the first (outermost) tracks simply because more data passes under the head in the same amount of time.
If you have very random accesses (and LOTS of them) in your workload, 15K RPM makes total sense. Games loading big files full of world data would only fit this description when those files are severely fragmented. Likewise with A/V editing: big files with long runs of sequential data accesses don't benefit from having the rotation speed slightly more than doubled but the density less than halved. (I did this song and dance when the VelociRaptor drives appeared on the market and even found someone with one they'd let me bench out for my workloads; I found that they can't beat a larger, slower drive for what I was doing.)
Now, if you've got a huge SQL database that has a ton of queries per second going on, you might stand to benefit from the higher worst-case performance. However, in modern times, such a database would probably benefit far more from a hardware RAID system or some SSD storage anyway.
Cardinal Richlieu replies: Ah, ignorance and stupidity all in the same package! How efficient of you!
But all jokes aside, I don't think your view of XP is a realistic one. People continue to use it because it works well and does what they need, plus it's damned fast on newer hardware. I dropped a clean XP image on a fast quad-core desktop that really shouldn't have XP (due to 12GB of RAM if nothing else) and the boot times and overall performance were kind of scary. It's like when people started testing Win98 on Vista-era hardware and 98 booted and started programs in a blink of an eye. Why is Win7 so slow by comparison? Why is Win8 so slow when you don't use cheats like the "fast boot" that is really a hybrid hibernate? XP has many merits even today, despite Microsoft and the XPocalypse.
The disabling of the "legacy boot menu" ability by default is ridiculous and makes any serious problems with Windows 8 frustrating to fix, as now we can't tell customers to slap F8 repeatedly, we have to tell them to force the machine off in mid-boot TWICE to get the menu and access safe mode. A number of older software titles don't work properly, especially older games. But you want to know what the absolute biggest problem I ended up having with Win8 was, and why I ultimately threw it out?
THE FUCKING CHARM BAR.
I have a laptop with Win8 from the factory and every time I'd slide my finger onto the touchpad from the right edge (a habit I didn't know I had until this) the stupid bar would appear. It happened constantly and infuriated me every time. IT'S NOT A TOUCHSCREEN, IT'S JUST THE DAMNED TOUCHPAD. Who thought this was a good idea?! I have dual monitors set up with the laptop, and the bar would steal focus and I'd have to dick with the pointer to make it go away so I could get back to work!
Touchscreens on home computers have begun to destroy everything good about them. I still have yet to meet anyone who is willing to sit there with their arm outstretched constantly to do work on a flipping touchscreen. I'm also a "square" monitor throwback: my 1600x1200 monitor is more versatile than a widescreen of the same inch diagonal which tends to come in 1366x768 or 1400x900 resolutions and be very annoying when working with vertical data (spreadsheets, SQL queries, etc.)
In my experience, most manufacturer support site drivers are literally nothing more than the original driver from the device's primary chip maker, but sometimes they've shipped with different INF files. Fortunately, aside from having a massive driver collection, I wrote software that automatically generates a drivers folder for me (in Linux) from the computer's own hardware information. It's scary how my driver folder maker is more accurate than Windows: turns out if it selected something for a piece of hardware, even if Windows won't auto-install that driver and thinks it's not correct, you can force it and things always work anyway!
Most of the people I work with are smaller corporations with less than 100GB of data, and the way I set them up guarantees that if the server hardware and filesystem aren't part of the problem, I can restore the data very quickly. Typically there are no network services at all other than Samba, so they don't even have databases to worry about. I can see how a larger or more active technical environment wouldn't be nearly so simple to recover though...my own office included. Having a 3TB mirror of everything doesn't change the horrible amount of time involved in copying that data from one drive to another and getting network services back up can be very frustrating.
For small business Linux storage servers, I personally use rsync to maintain a mirror of a Linux server's shared folder repository and copy out mirrored files that change to a rolling backup snapshot structure which is also shared out as read-only. If something encrypts all their documents, they have 60 days worth of backup snapshots and one of those will be massive from the huge number of files changing out when cron fires off rsync. Recovery is so simple, too.
They should have proper backup procedures. Sadly, most don't back up at all. If they're hit with this thing, they have to weigh the negative of paying criminals against the value of the data to them. If it's important enough, they don't really have many options.
A company with a proper data backup plan will not be seriously affected by this thing. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the small businesses I work with don't have a backup plan at all. Plugging in an external hard drive and setting up the backup software that came with it is NOT a sufficient backup plan, people! They unfortunately found this out the hard way and lost everything on one of their computers. Giving hundreds of dollars to a criminal enterprise was not an acceptable solution to the business owner, and I can't say I disagreed, especially since the old files weren't of much importance to the business anyway.
CryptoLocker should teach everyone to back up their work twice over and keep one backup isolated and very preferably off-site. Data is very easy to lose at the worst possible time.
You are thinking of Britain. In the United States, you only lose that protection if you do something stupid like boot up and type the password into your encrypted laptop so they can inspect it.
I'm a person who knows how versioning of software works. Firefox does have a versioning problem: major versions get bumped for minor changes. There hasn't been a Firefox XX.1 for quite a while. Just because they can "rapid release" version numbers doesn't mean they should. The whole point of using major/minor/bugfix versioning is supposed to be to let someone know if a change is major enough under the hood to break things. When they moved to Vista, it made sense to bump the major version since Vista broke the shit out of everything. What broke because Firefox went from 21.0 to 22.0? Maybe an extension or two at most? What major changes were made in that time period? Not enough to bump a major version number. What's the point in emulating proper software versioning if all you do with it is say "stuff changed, here's a bigger number?"
Go to System32. Right click on a few DLL files. Look at the details Explorer extracts from VS_VERSION_INFO in those files. Shit bricks when you see a majority of them on Windows 8 labeled with versions starting with 6.2 and ending in a four digit build identifier. Realize that you don't seem to fully understand what you're talking about here. Why not just label Windows by build number? I'm sure you recall using Windows 2526 after all!
1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes
2: organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests
So feminist theory is supposedly about gender equality, while the real-world activity is on behalf of women's rights and interests...by definition, no less! If actions are indeed louder than words, then the female-serving aspect is also louder than the theoretical equality aspect.
The single best way to ruin a satisfying career is to add women to it.
I don't think this statement is fair. I think that if you add women (or men for that matter) with toxic mindsets to any workplace, the workplace goes to hell quickly. Women who are catty and backstabbing and childish don't belong in ANY sane work environment. Unfortunately, the ones who don't ruin it for everyone else are not the ones who get all the attention in media and blogs and social networks.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends largely on the skill level of the operator and what network equipment is between them and the big bad Interwebs. I agree with your point in general though.
I don't find 8 to perform better than 7. On a technical level, 8 uses a lot of trickery to "boot" faster, but once it's up and running with all of the usual software installed (browser, office suite, etc.) there is no performance difference between my Win8-from-factory laptop on 8 and on 7. When you do a true cold boot (reboot or hold shift when hitting "shut down") 8 actually seems to start more slowly than 7 on the same hardware. XP makes them both look like dogs, but alas, it's aging out...
People on XP probably aren't running OS updates anyway. They tended to slow down the system overall or sometimes even wreck the OS entirely.
I would like to point out that 15K RPM HDDs are a waste of money for the vast majority of home and SOHO workloads. 7200 RPM drives of significantly higher capacities greatly outperform 10K and 15K HDDs. Higher rotational speed only improves the rotational latency. The greatly increased data density of lower RPM drives easily offsets this. High RPM drives are almost always short-stroked which means your heads never find their way to outer tracks by design. A 7200 RPM drive with the same platter density as the 15K RPM drive will have higher sequential read times on the first (outermost) tracks simply because more data passes under the head in the same amount of time.
If you have very random accesses (and LOTS of them) in your workload, 15K RPM makes total sense. Games loading big files full of world data would only fit this description when those files are severely fragmented. Likewise with A/V editing: big files with long runs of sequential data accesses don't benefit from having the rotation speed slightly more than doubled but the density less than halved. (I did this song and dance when the VelociRaptor drives appeared on the market and even found someone with one they'd let me bench out for my workloads; I found that they can't beat a larger, slower drive for what I was doing.)
Now, if you've got a huge SQL database that has a ton of queries per second going on, you might stand to benefit from the higher worst-case performance. However, in modern times, such a database would probably benefit far more from a hardware RAID system or some SSD storage anyway.
Cardinal Richlieu replies: Ah, ignorance and stupidity all in the same package! How efficient of you!
But all jokes aside, I don't think your view of XP is a realistic one. People continue to use it because it works well and does what they need, plus it's damned fast on newer hardware. I dropped a clean XP image on a fast quad-core desktop that really shouldn't have XP (due to 12GB of RAM if nothing else) and the boot times and overall performance were kind of scary. It's like when people started testing Win98 on Vista-era hardware and 98 booted and started programs in a blink of an eye. Why is Win7 so slow by comparison? Why is Win8 so slow when you don't use cheats like the "fast boot" that is really a hybrid hibernate? XP has many merits even today, despite Microsoft and the XPocalypse.
The disabling of the "legacy boot menu" ability by default is ridiculous and makes any serious problems with Windows 8 frustrating to fix, as now we can't tell customers to slap F8 repeatedly, we have to tell them to force the machine off in mid-boot TWICE to get the menu and access safe mode. A number of older software titles don't work properly, especially older games. But you want to know what the absolute biggest problem I ended up having with Win8 was, and why I ultimately threw it out?
THE FUCKING CHARM BAR.
I have a laptop with Win8 from the factory and every time I'd slide my finger onto the touchpad from the right edge (a habit I didn't know I had until this) the stupid bar would appear. It happened constantly and infuriated me every time. IT'S NOT A TOUCHSCREEN, IT'S JUST THE DAMNED TOUCHPAD. Who thought this was a good idea?! I have dual monitors set up with the laptop, and the bar would steal focus and I'd have to dick with the pointer to make it go away so I could get back to work!
Touchscreens on home computers have begun to destroy everything good about them. I still have yet to meet anyone who is willing to sit there with their arm outstretched constantly to do work on a flipping touchscreen. I'm also a "square" monitor throwback: my 1600x1200 monitor is more versatile than a widescreen of the same inch diagonal which tends to come in 1366x768 or 1400x900 resolutions and be very annoying when working with vertical data (spreadsheets, SQL queries, etc.)
In my experience, most manufacturer support site drivers are literally nothing more than the original driver from the device's primary chip maker, but sometimes they've shipped with different INF files. Fortunately, aside from having a massive driver collection, I wrote software that automatically generates a drivers folder for me (in Linux) from the computer's own hardware information. It's scary how my driver folder maker is more accurate than Windows: turns out if it selected something for a piece of hardware, even if Windows won't auto-install that driver and thinks it's not correct, you can force it and things always work anyway!
Most of the people I work with are smaller corporations with less than 100GB of data, and the way I set them up guarantees that if the server hardware and filesystem aren't part of the problem, I can restore the data very quickly. Typically there are no network services at all other than Samba, so they don't even have databases to worry about. I can see how a larger or more active technical environment wouldn't be nearly so simple to recover though...my own office included. Having a 3TB mirror of everything doesn't change the horrible amount of time involved in copying that data from one drive to another and getting network services back up can be very frustrating.
For small business Linux storage servers, I personally use rsync to maintain a mirror of a Linux server's shared folder repository and copy out mirrored files that change to a rolling backup snapshot structure which is also shared out as read-only. If something encrypts all their documents, they have 60 days worth of backup snapshots and one of those will be massive from the huge number of files changing out when cron fires off rsync. Recovery is so simple, too.
rsync -av $BACKUP/backup.$AGE_IN_DAYS/ $SAMBA_SHARED_FOLDER/
They should have proper backup procedures. Sadly, most don't back up at all. If they're hit with this thing, they have to weigh the negative of paying criminals against the value of the data to them. If it's important enough, they don't really have many options.
A company with a proper data backup plan will not be seriously affected by this thing. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the small businesses I work with don't have a backup plan at all. Plugging in an external hard drive and setting up the backup software that came with it is NOT a sufficient backup plan, people! They unfortunately found this out the hard way and lost everything on one of their computers. Giving hundreds of dollars to a criminal enterprise was not an acceptable solution to the business owner, and I can't say I disagreed, especially since the old files weren't of much importance to the business anyway.
CryptoLocker should teach everyone to back up their work twice over and keep one backup isolated and very preferably off-site. Data is very easy to lose at the worst possible time.
Can't they just download Galaxy Torch? Geez.
You are thinking of Britain. In the United States, you only lose that protection if you do something stupid like boot up and type the password into your encrypted laptop so they can inspect it.
I actually know people who would find this useful. Us CBM die-hards are a strange lot.
My secret identity is Tweak from South Park. OH JEEZUS!!!
That hurt. I think I sprained a sanity.
At most fashion magazines, who do women report to and who sits on the board?
Women.
I'm a person who knows how versioning of software works. Firefox does have a versioning problem: major versions get bumped for minor changes. There hasn't been a Firefox XX.1 for quite a while. Just because they can "rapid release" version numbers doesn't mean they should. The whole point of using major/minor/bugfix versioning is supposed to be to let someone know if a change is major enough under the hood to break things. When they moved to Vista, it made sense to bump the major version since Vista broke the shit out of everything. What broke because Firefox went from 21.0 to 22.0? Maybe an extension or two at most? What major changes were made in that time period? Not enough to bump a major version number. What's the point in emulating proper software versioning if all you do with it is say "stuff changed, here's a bigger number?"
Go to System32. Right click on a few DLL files. Look at the details Explorer extracts from VS_VERSION_INFO in those files. Shit bricks when you see a majority of them on Windows 8 labeled with versions starting with 6.2 and ending in a four digit build identifier. Realize that you don't seem to fully understand what you're talking about here. Why not just label Windows by build number? I'm sure you recall using Windows 2526 after all!
XP is 5.1, Win8 is 6.2; I only see one major version number difference. Did you mean minor versions?
Hint: ad hominem. Hint: you lose all arguments when you start name-calling.
Interesting. There are two definitions from M-W:
1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes
2: organized activity on behalf of women's rights and interests
So feminist theory is supposedly about gender equality, while the real-world activity is on behalf of women's rights and interests...by definition, no less! If actions are indeed louder than words, then the female-serving aspect is also louder than the theoretical equality aspect.
In some ways, those two groups are equally oppressed.
Ah, a fine example of intellectual sloth and fallacious reasoning. "Disagreement equals justification."
The single best way to ruin a satisfying career is to add women to it.
I don't think this statement is fair. I think that if you add women (or men for that matter) with toxic mindsets to any workplace, the workplace goes to hell quickly. Women who are catty and backstabbing and childish don't belong in ANY sane work environment. Unfortunately, the ones who don't ruin it for everyone else are not the ones who get all the attention in media and blogs and social networks.